Bug Description

I think it is this package (it's the man-db script run form cron.daily and cron.weekly that is causing the problem)
man-db:
Installed: 2.4.4-3
Candidate: 2.4.4-3
Version table:
*** 2.4.4-3 0
500 http://nz.archive.ubuntu.com gutsy/main Packages
100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

I'm getting dialy messages from cron as the man-db job is exexuted from cron.daily. They started with:

Unfortunately I am a little puzzled here; I can see where it's failing, but the program state doesn't make as much sense as I'd like, and it looks like there may have been some memory corruption interfering with my ability to track down what's wrong. Could you please send me a little bit of extra information so that I can try to recreate this?

* attach the file /var/cache/man/index.db to this bug
* attach the output of 'dpkg-query -W' to this bug

Thanks. This database is corrupt; accessdb can't open it, and gdb indicates that the hash bucket storage is confused beyond words.

There are (at least) two bugs here. The first is that gdbm_store segfaults when trying to insert a new entry into this database, rather than exiting cleanly; I've created a new bug task for this. The second is that, at least before gdbm started segfaulting, mandb should have fallen back to creating the database from scratch. I'll see if I can at least address the latter bug.

The possible third bug is why the database became corrupt in the first place, but I doubt we can answer that now; it could have been filesystem corruption due to e.g. a power failure.

In the meantime, run 'sudo -u man mandb --create --quiet' and that should clear things up for you.